Note: Like most of my movie reviews, this one is primarily intended for readers of the source material and analyzes the movie as an adaptation rather than an independent work.

The Basics:

Deep in the sewers of Derry, Maine, lurks the insidious It, an ancient, shapeshifting evil that poisons the minds of the locals, feeds on fear and children, and often takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Following only the past timeline of the novel, seven kids, all self-confessed losers in various ways, must come together to defeat It and protect others like themselves.

The Downside:

While the use of fairytale logic and the power of belief won’t bother fans, a single line of exposition would have been polite to help newcomers understand certain tactics the kids use against Pennywise as magic rather than continuity errors.

As could be easily feared and expected, the character of Mike comes off as a bit of a peripheral afterthought, which was often the case in the book, but made worse here by the transfer of the historian role to Ben. Meanwhile, the circumstances of the finale are oversimplified by the patently lazy damseling of Beverly in a way that was not in the book, although it must be noted that some much more extraordinary ill-use of Beverly was in the book, and is thankfully removed here.

An attempt is made to give her some dignity even in her damsel function, by having her resist Pennywise’s fear-inducement powers, but this only serves to muddy the heroism of the losers, by implying that an absence of fear is necessary to defeat It, rather than the willingness to do so in spite of their obvious fear, which is what makes the whole group of them so easy to root for most of the time.

This change to the structure of the finale also removes some of the purpose of Henry Bowers, the lead bully character who’s given just enough focus and development to make his ultimate insignificance (at least within this volume) disappointing.

The Upside:

As can be said for all the best Stephen King adaptations, this one makes the absolute most of its scares, while taking the best of the underlying framework of the characters and breathing life into them.

The performances of all the young actors are stellar and amazingly natural. When not being paralyzed by the Deadlights, Beverly oozes every ounce of cool she’s supposed to, mixed with all the world-weary vulnerability and, yes, fear that’s forced her to become that cool. The friendship of the whole losers’ club feels vividly authentic, and with the wise removal of any explicit mentions of cosmic forces compelling them to follow the group, follow the leader, follow the plot, their bond is forced to form and sustain itself on an entirely human level. They’re given the freedom to fight and disagree and determine for themselves that they still need each other.

Without that cosmic bestowing of unquestioned authority upon Bill, his leadership is made to stand on its own, and (who’d have guessed it?) it does. His relationship with his lost brother is played up to a heart-wrenching degree instead of simply stated, adding weight to everything he does. He’s even allowed to be wrong, prioritizing his revenge story over his friends, and he’s all the more likeable for his fallibility.

And then there’s Pennywise himself.

This Pennywise doesn’t spend the course of the movie idly threatening and taunting and waiting for his moment. This Pennywise is an unrelenting onslaught of world-warping terror. He’s powerful in his use of the kids’ specific fears, but also as a creature of darkness beyond charted reality.

The jumpscares are sparing but perfectly timed, and taken far beyond the usual startle that’s over before it starts. If you’re not scared by a loud music sting, don’t worry, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of screams you’re hurtling into.

Altogether a terrifying, heartfelt, and quite reverent adaptation given the time allotted, and a seasonal must-see for fans of both the book and horror movies in general.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

The time has finally come to unveil the cover and announce a release date for Some Side Effects May Occur​.

I don't mind sharing that this YA body-horror novel set in the not too distant future has been, without hyperbole, the single most difficult project I've ever worked on, taking me through some of the sicker corners of my brain, but it's finally complete, and without further ado, I'm proud to share a first glimpse of it!

Rachel Blum isn’t beautiful — yet. But she’s got it all figured out. All she has to do is save up enough money as a medical test subject to have her nose fixed, and make sure her friends and family don’t notice that she’s stopped eating. It’ll all be worth it if she can get chosen as a promising new talent by the Public Aesthetics Endowment, giving her access to all the loan money she’ll need to have her body made fully camera-ready, so her acting career can finally begin.

When one of the labs she works for begins trials for a miracle beauty supplement called Swan, Rachel’s skeptical of its claims. No more starving. No more sweating. No more surgery. She’s heard that pitch before. But this treatment is different. There’s no denying it when she drops fifteen pounds and grows three inches overnight. There’s no denying it when she scores both the next lead role in Roberts High’s legendary drama department and the attentions of its uncontested leading man. And there’s certainly no denying it when her newly out-of-control appetite for flesh starts becoming murderously selective.

Prepare for a grisly and haunting tale of one girl’s quest to be good enough at last.

This one's hitting shelves on September 5th, 2017, but you can preorder it now:

After R’s return to life from zombiehood and the cascade of change his recovery has sparked in all of zombiekind, the world is in a delicate state of flux, its population on the verge of reclaiming its humanity on a colossal scale.

And the evil doesn’t like that at all.

This time, the forces of order through destruction and domination take a new form, no longer flesheating skeletons but a continent-wide network of insincerely smiling suits who call themselves the Axiom Group, determined to control or eliminate the resurrection power that seems to stem from R and Julie’s love. Along with their few surviving friends, the pair take off in search of some way to preserve what they’ve only begun to build together, but Axiom is dangerous for more than its weapons and numbers. It carries a connection to the pre-zombie life that R can’t remember and doesn’t want. Fighting Axiom means allowing its secrets to resurface from the basement of his mind, secrets that threaten to overwrite the very life he’s trying to hold onto.

The Downside:

The Burning World is decidedly more meandering than its predecessor. The frequent interludes narrated by the collective consciousness of all accumulated human experience are sometimes insightful and do include some plot setup for the end, but their quantity when combined with the more essential flashbacks to R’s first life slow the forestory down severely in places. It doesn’t help that much of that forestory, when we do get back to it, is taken up with our heroes rehashing new permutations of the same argument about the fact that they have no solid plan.

Abram, the group’s newest ally of convenience, constantly belittling and overruling Julie gets particularly grating, especially when he’s routinely right about her ideas being fickle and unhelpful. The ultimate point is the good one that everyone is uncertain, flailing in the dark, and making things up as they go just as much as R is, Julie included, and R can love her even better as a flawed, human equal than as an ideal on a pedestal, but this directionless flailing, however realistic, is unsatisfying in a narrative, and is only resolved in time for a lead-in to the third and final book, rather than a climax of its own. Meanwhile, this validated dismissal of the primary female character’s input seems to run counter to the general message of universal human respect, as do a few other small instances.

There’s a moment when R insists on running into a seemingly suicidal fight, asks Julie to stay behind out of danger, and leaves her with the thought that “she’ll either respect my wishes, or she won’t.” She doesn’t, of course, and he doesn’t hold this against her, but the hypocrisy of his hope that she will “respect his wishes” for her safety in the exact moment he’s disregarding her identical wishes for his, is never called out, so it’s difficult to tell whether such a moment is an excessively subtle piece of the overall commentary, or simply a contradiction that slipped by.

The Upside:

For all that, The Burning World makes abundantly clear where its heart lies, and it earns an A still bordering on an A+ for the weight of its content combined with the sheer poetry of its execution -- no less than readers have learned to expect of Isaac Marion.

R’s trek through both his present and past is a harrowing, blistering tour of every excuse ever concocted to deny a person’s humanity, or the value of humanity’s better nature altogether.

Because I have my own family to worry about first.

Because I’m too small to help.

Because God wants it this way.

Because there is no God, or any other form of purpose or point, so we might as well take what we please from whoever has it.

Because the fact that I have more than someone else must somehow prove that I did something to deserve it.

Because I am a real person, and they, for whatever quibbling difference of biology or geography, are not.

And so on.

This is the story of an ex-zombie, an ex-nothing, who thought all he wanted was to be a person with a life and now must decide what kind of person he is and what to do with that life. It’s the story of a man trying to build an identity in a world that largely considers masculinity and humanity to be synonymous, and measures both by one’s ability to establish a distinction of “us versus them” and cling to the winning side of it. It’s about the strength it takes to step back from that quickest route to feeling like a person and say no, I can do better than that.

The Burning World builds on Warm Bodies’ unique critique of the zombie genre’s usual hyper-indulgence of the instinct to dehumanize an enemy, developing the concept into a brutal and timely skewering of apathy, greed, and rationalized cruelty, while rooting itself back in the original’s celebration of life, of connection, communication, love, and the determination to create something better than what was there before. These are still the cure to unfeeling, unthinking, ever-consuming zombiehood itself.

At the same time, this remains a deeply personal story as well, pushing R and Julie’s relationship past the rush of first discovering each other and into the challenge of balancing and bridging their separate private struggles and impossible hopes for themselves.

Through all the themes large and small, the prose is, as ever, lyrical yet direct, unapologetically passionate, and able to make even the most obvious and universal of feelings fresh and new.

While Warm Bodies is the more satisfyingly self-contained read, and one I would recommend to anyone, I second Marion’s assertion that The Burning World can be read out of order. And maybe it can’t wait for the time it takes to catch up. As he says, this is a book for now.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Hey, everyone, I've been working on getting these listings up and functioning for a couple weeks now, but I think the time's come for an official announcement.

As you can see by the fancy little countdown widget to your right, we do, finally, at long, long last, have a release date for Slivers, book 3 of The Prospero Chronicles!

That's right. Ben, Mina, their mismatched friends, and their shapeshifting foes will continue their battle for the odd little forest town of Prospero and the fate of all humanity on July 6, 2017.

Yes, this July.

"But wait!" you cry (or I hope a few of you do), "I can't even get my hands on the first two volumes of The Prospero Chronicles, since those darned contract squabbles pushed them out of print!"

Well, good news! Leading up to the release of Slivers, Matt and I are also going to be releasing our independent new editions of volumes 1&2.

With snazzy new covers, naturally.

So who wants a peek? I do, I do!

Under normal circumstances, Ben and Mina would never have had reason to speak to each other. He’s an easy-going people person with a healthy skepticism about the paranormal; she’s a dangerously obsessive monster-hunter with a crippling fear of betrayal. But the small Northern California town of Prospero, with its rich history of cryptid sightings, miracles, and mysterious disappearances, has no normal circumstances to offer.

When Ben’s missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, stumbles out of Prospero’s surrounding woods and right into her own funeral, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Different as they are, their unlikely friendship may be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.

"A snapping, crackling, popping homage to classic horror that alludes to no optimistic resolution—all the more reason for a series." -Kirkus Reviews

Looking for the Kindle edition? The Kindle store listing won't be up for a couple months, but Smashwords has Kindle format available to preorder now.

But what about book 2?

When autumn descends on Prospero, California, Ben hopes the normality of the new school year may offer a reprieve from the town’s paranormal horrors. Mina knows all too well that there are no reprieves and no normality to be had in Prospero, but even she can’t prepare for what the coming year holds.

On top of the vivid hallucinations that have plagued Mina since the attack on the Warehouse, and the brewing Splinter civil war that threatens all of humanity, inside the walls of Prospero High, Ben, Mina, and their expanding Network face a vicious campaign to destroy their friendship, and a mysterious assassin picking off human rebels – an assassin with powers like no Splinter they’ve fought before.

Ben and Mina’s one hope rests with a mysterious old man hiding in the woods outside of town; a living legend who may be able to teach them how to fight this dangerous new breed of Splinter. That is, assuming he doesn’t kill the pair of them himself.

“Titchenell and Carter hold nothing back in this solid sequel that thrills and expands on its predecessor. Aided by swift writing, relatable characters and unexpected scares, Shards is a chill-inducing delight.” —David Powers King, co-author of Woven.

Growing up is hard, and growing up in Prospero is even harder, but I think we manage. I mean, yeah, my friends and I spend more of our time fighting a race of shapeshifting aliens than we do hanging out, but we have our fun. We go to parties, help each other with our classes, maybe even fall in love…

I’ve no illusions that we live ordinary lives, but they’re our lives, and I’m going to make sure we make the most of them whether the Splinters want us to or not.

Mina

The truce is temporary. We will not humor the Splinters forever. It's only until the Slivers can be stopped, until the army of Shards being planted among our classmates can be disassembled, until we get our hands on the thing I'd almost given up believing in.

The humanity test.

For the chance to know, once and for all, who can be trusted, some dealings with monsters must be excusable. Inevitable. Just like this feeling between Ben and me.

Sadly, paperback pre-orders likely won't be available for this one until shortly before release time, but yes, there will be paperbacks, so if you like that physical charm, mark your calendars!

So... who else is excited?

Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

If you don't do Smashwords, not to worry, pre-orders are coming soon to all platforms, including paperback.

Stand by for cover reveal and release announcements for The Prospero Chronicles soon as well (yes, including a cover and release date for the long-delayed third installment), but for now, in case you missed it in its previous run, here's the teaser for Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of):

The world is Cassie Fremont’s playground. Her face is on the cover of every newspaper. She has no homework, no curfew, and no credit limit, and she spends her days traveling the country with her friends, including a boy who would do the chicken dance with death to make her smile. Life is just about perfect—except that those newspaper headlines are about her bludgeoning her crush to death with a paintball gun, she has to fight ravenous walking corpses every time she steps outside, and one of her friends is still missing, trapped somewhere in the distant, practically impassable wreckage of Manhattan.

Still, Cassie’s an optimist, more prone to hysterical laughter than hysterical tears, and she’d rather fight a corpse than be one. She’ll never leave a friend stranded when she can simply take her road trip to impossible new places, even if getting there means admitting to that boy that she might love him as more than her personal jester. Skillfully blending effective horror with unexpected humor, this diary-style novel is a fast-paced and heartwarming read.

“Heartbreak, humor, a very large number of crushed skulls and even romance ensue . . . . Readers who don’t mind a little brain spatter on the windshield will be happy they took this particular trip.” --Kirkus Reviews.

“You know when you read a book about teens and you think the author just didn’t get it? Well, F.J.R. Titchenell gets video gaming, paintballing, Vespa riding, teenage tomboy angst, true love, the uses of theater paint—oh, and killing zombies.” —Lehua Parker, author of the Nene Award-nominated Niuhi Shark Saga.

“The story is fast, filled with dark humor, and lots of blood and guts.” --All Things Urban Fantasy.

Seriously, this announcement comes with a huge thanks to everyone who's helped support Matt's and my transition into independently re-releasing these books, and to everyone who's waited patiently for news of new printings.

Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Jacob’s grandfather has always been full of fanciful tales about his youth. For much of his life, Jacob assumed them to be nothing more than that, but when he gets the chance to take a trip to the island where his grandfather weathered World War II as a child, he finds evidence that the magical children’s home of his grandfather’s stories is not only real, but still there.

The Downside:

The tone of the book isn’t well telegraphed by the cover, and as a result, enjoyment of the contents depends wildly on personal expectations and how fortunately tastes happen to align. Many reviews I’ve come across after reading it myself complain that the cover promises horror and that the text fails to deliver. I personally expected something fairly whimsical based on the title and was surprised (pleasantly, for my taste) by the more effectively disturbing moments within. Some readers might be disappointed by how much of the book is spent in the ordinary world before reaching the titular home for peculiar children, but as the ordinary world parts are the strongest, I won’t complain on that point either.

Less pleasant, whatever your tonal expectations and preferences, is the flatness of the inhabitants of the home once we meet them. Each is defined by a peculiar ability and a few broad strokes besides, at best. There’s also a dose of open sexism draped only in that sneaky veil of self-deprecation (“boys can’t be expected to be as smart and responsible as girls!”) that certain authors seem to imagine is charming.

The Upside:

Where the peculiar children themselves fall short, the setup of Jacob’s ordinary life and family steal the show. Rather than cleanly vanishing into the background the moment the low fantasy elements arrive to whisk Jacob away to his destined escape, Jacob’s family of alienated generations of sad, unfulfilled people crumbles apart under its own uncomfortably real weight. Jacob is left by honest dysfunction rather than genre convention to decide alone how deep he means to plunge into the peculiar children’s unsettling world.

Exactly how unsettling does that world get? Well, here’s a spine-chiller of a concept: Bodies can’t age at the home for peculiar children. They also can’t decompose. This means that one of the children who died by accident at some point in their eternal seclusion is still lying in one of the home’s bedrooms, perpetually as fresh as the day it happened. Every so often, as a treat to the others, the one child whose peculiarity involves power over life and death saves up enough still-beating hearts from dead animals to rev up the dead friend’s corpse into a half-alive zombie state for a brief chat.

A strange juxtaposition with the nearly middle grade vibe that sometimes stems from the prepubescent attitudes and fairytale-like simplicity of the peculiar children? Yes, very. But genuinely creepy on the teens-and-up horror level that most of the book seems to aim for? Oh yes. The creep factor is both real and memorable with a particular vintage flavor, enhanced by the real antique photographs around which many of the story’s gags are written.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

This is a simple one. It’s that moment when a character points out and possibly even protests the terribly insulting thing the plot is doing… to no effect.

Example? Why, I’m glad you asked.

In the final season of Angel, a series of shifts in the show’s focus and one actress’s pregnancy resulted in the main lineup of evil-fighters looking like this:

That’s five men (the green demon is a white actor underneath if you’re keeping score on that front) and one woman. The woman, Fred, is brilliant and thoroughly lovable but also the only member of the team without either superpowers or some level of combat training, making her the go-to damsel.

In the lead up to the series finale, Fred gets implanted with a demon, which is slowly killing her as it gestates and prepares to take over the world.

Desperate to save both the world and herself (because who wouldn’t be?), Fred works long hours in her laboratory looking for a cure, in spite of her deteriorating health. When Wesley, one of her many doting male associates, comes to tell her to rest, she objects with, “No! I’m not just the damsel in distress!”

“I’m better than that!”

Yay! Fred’s reclaiming her agency! Surely the writers have noticed how they’ve been treating her and are about to rectify the problem, and-

Oh, wait, no.

****Spoiler Alert****

Fred’s attempts to save herself come to absolutely nothing, and her soul is eaten by the demon who takes over her body, providing lots of angst for her many admiring male survivors.

****End Spoilers****

This peeve isn’t about the general practice of pointing out problems with fiction from within the fiction (known in storytelling jargon as “lampshading,” hence my little title joke).

It’s a technique that can do wonders under the right circumstances, ideally when the story pointing out the writing sin is a work of meta-satire that successfully manages to be smarter than most stories that commit said sin.

Sidney in Scream makes a complaint of this sort that works, because her respective story takes it to heart, when she tells Ghostface that she doesn’t watch horror movies because the victims are an insulting bunch of busty blondes who “run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”

I really AM better than that!

Sidney says this shortly after Ghostface finishes with his busty blonde first victim of the movie (played by Drew Barrymore), but Sidney herself remains competent throughout, outsmarting and outmaneuvering Ghostface, at one point running upstairs to escape through a second story window only after he blocks her attempt for the front door.

Even that opening scene with the death of Casey subverts the tradition Sidney is calling out by actively desexualizing the violence. Casey remains fully clothed in a baggy sweater throughout, and as soon as the scene transitions from flirty meta-banter to physical threat, it turns deadly serious, focusing on audience sympathy for Casey over the more typical creative dismemberment.

This part of the scene is not FUN.

Lampshading can also work when it’s used to write off a practical issue that’s standing in the way of the best possible story.

“Hey, didn’t we used to be a delivery service?”

In the case of this Futurama joke, the show is completely guilty of the sin it’s pointing out, that is, inconsistent accounting for how the characters spend their time and make their income. It works, though, because the strength of Futurama comes from the variety of its zany, episodic plotlines.

No one’s mourning the fact that we don’t spend more time watching the cast delivering packages. This isn’t something that’s central to the point of the story, and there’s no real-life social context attached. It’s an oversight that doesn’t ill-use or insult anything except, mildly, the audience’s long term memory, so once we receive this nod of acknowledgement, we can move on to enjoying the crew's more interesting spacefaring hijinks, satisfied that our intelligence is respected and the creators aren’t trying to slip anything past us.

The lampshade only becomes pointless, worse-than-nothing glass when a work of fiction commits a more real-life serious or story-integral sin and then points it out without doing anything to remedy it, apparently with the mistaken belief that pointing at the problem is the same thing as fixing it.

There’s a scene in City of Bones in which the Shadowhunters have to sneak into a church to raid a secret stash of anti-demon weaponry. So as not to imply that Christianity is the only viable avenue for fighting evil, Jace quickly explains that all organized religions are secretly in on the cause.

“We could just as easily have gone to a synagogue or a mosque.”

Yeah, but you didn’t though, did you, Jace? The lampshade line is there, but Christianity remains the only religion we actually see involved in fighting evil.

Okay, religion is an extremely delicate subject, and if an artist doesn’t feel qualified to represent a real-life culture in fiction, steering clear can sometimes be the wisest course of action, so maybe we can give that one a pass.

Not so much this little gem of a moment in the Twilight book-verse:

“You know, I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships.”

Jacob throws this out there in Eclipse, the book in which Edward disables Bella’s car and physically prevents her from visiting other friends. The joke of this line is presumably intended to come off something like, “Ha ha, Edward and Bella sure are easy to mistake for an abusive relationship, aren’t they? But they’re not, though.”

Except they completely are, and this lampshade does nothing to change how unhealthy they are or how reprehensibly the story romanticizes that abuse.

Should we even touch how bad the Marvel movies have gotten with this lately? Eh, why not, we all know these, right?

Remember that party scene where the Avengers men all acknowledge that, back in their solo franchises, most of them had love interests? They talk for a while about what the ladies are up to and try to one-up each other with stories about how smart/independent/tough/generally awesome their girlfriends are.

That’s really sweet, guys. It’s great that you’re so supportive. Sounds like some of those women are having pretty cool adventures!

…Which we’re never, ever going to see any of, are we? Not a snippet of any of them ever doing anything remotely relevant to any movie that we’re actually watching, ever again. Nope, the narrative follows the men, and the men alone, wherever they go.

But at least we’re going to get some new costumed women soon who might get some narrative focus of their own, right?

…Right?

“It’s about damn time.”

So sayeth Wasp when Hank Pym, her movie-universe father, finally bestows on her her mother’s supersuit, indicating that he’s done being demeaningly overprotective of her.

Yes, Marvel. It is about damn time Hope’s father acknowledges her power (see last week’s peeve). And yes, we get the meta-joke that it is about damn time Marvel movies likewise acknowledge female supers collectively.

It was "about damn time" a long time ago. It was "about damn time" before this post credits tack-on in Ant-Man, and it continues to be "about damn time" far more urgently and dramatically than a 2018 release of a movie titled “Ant-Man and The Wasp” (emphasis mine) can come anywhere close to addressing.

Lampshades alone don’t make problems go away, not if the problems are big enough. Self-deprecatory humor can only buy you so much leeway. Sometimes the only patch for that insulting plot is to just do the thing right in the first place.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

If you already know what I’m getting at based on the title above, Horror geek kudos to you. Double kudos if you happen to remember the 2009 3D remake of My Bloody Valentine, to which I will be taking a sledgehammer in this article.

Oh, and for which there will be spoilers, in case you care.

Now, to explain this peeve to anyone who hasn’t guessed it, I’m going to turn the mic over to my good friend, Annie Wilkes.

"The bad guy stuck [Rocketman] in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out, but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned, and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting, 'This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!'"

Thanks, Annie!

In the book version of Misery, Annie expands on this by contrasting it with a different week of her favorite serial, in which the cliffhanger left Rocketman in a crashing plane, and the start of the next episode showed him finding a parachute under his seat.

Maybe not the most likely thing to happen, she admits, but she finds it acceptable. And that’s the real point of this peeve. Drawing the line where manipulation of the audience crosses over into just plain cheating.

That line is crossed when the story lies.

A couple of my favorite movies sadly nudge their toes over this line. Sorry, Ex Machina and Saw II, you’re in the hot seat this week.

Overall, Ex Machina is a seriously smart and intense Sci-Fi thriller, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend skipping the spoiler section here and watching it asap.

But it does have two little lines in it that drive me crazy…

***Ex Machina spoilers ahead***

"Ava isn't pretending to like you."

Nathan says this to our hero, Caleb, about the flirtation he’s developing with Ava, the artificial intelligence they’re testing together.

What Nathan means in that scene is that he programmed Ava to be capable of sexual interest as a human would be, not to flirt with Caleb in an artificially pre-scripted way.

But later on, when Nathan is trying to ease Caleb out of the head game he’s put him through for the purpose of testing Ava, he proposes, as an alternative to Caleb’s debate between believing that Ava likes him and believing that she’s an imitation of a person liking him, the third option that, “She’s pretending to like you.”

The pause after this suggestion might as well include a "dun dun DUN!" music sting.

What Nathan is saying this time is that Ava is not imitating flirtation because she was programmed to, but because she is conscious and intelligent enough to view Caleb as a means of escape from Nathan’s lab and is manipulating him for this purpose, which turns out to be exactly the case.

It’s a great twist, mostly, but it’s undercut by the She’s not pretending to like you/She is pretending to like you contradiction.

The most satisfying twists are the ones that were hiding unnoticed under our noses the whole time. Twists that come out of nowhere can be okay too, but twists that come out of a place we were explicitly told not to look, those feel like a cheat.

***End Ex Machina spoilers***

Saw II pulls almost exactly the same gambit.

***Saw II spoilers ahead***

The premise of Saw II is that Detective Matthews and a full S.W.A.T team have John Kramer (a.k.a “Jigsaw”) cornered in his lair while one of Jigsaw's deadly games plays out, with Matthews’ son stuck inside it. The twist is that the game has already finished, the monitors in the lair are showing a recording, and that Matthews’ son was being protected throughout the game by a Jigsaw accomplice and is now inside a time-delay safe that will open and reunite him safely with his father, if Matthews can only wait around that long without doing anything rash.

There’s just one teeny little line you have to ignore, or it ruins everything.

“[You can waste time here until your son] starts to bleed from every orifice he has. Oh yes, there will be blood.”

Jigsaw is referring to the sarin gas that kills the losers of the game, and he’s explicitly stating that this will happen to Matthews’ son in the near future, as if the game is still in progress.

All the other cryptic gibberish Jigsaw feeds Matthews throughout the movie makes sense in retrospect, knowing that the sarin game is over and Matthews’ own game only requires him to sit still while the timer runs down, but this one line has no alternate interpretation that works that way.

It’s just a flat-out lie.

***End Saw II spoilers***

The Ex Machina and Saw II offenses can be somewhat defended by the fact that Nathan and Jigsaw are both untrustworthy characters. They damage the sanctity of their own experiments by lying to their subjects the way they do, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their motivations, but they’re imperfect, not entirely sane people. Jigsaw’s even dying of a brain tumor. It can be rationalized that they’d make a few mistakes and occasionally fail in adhering to the scientific method.

What can’t be excused is when the story lies directly to the audience, without a fallible character as an intermediary.

Your turn, My Bloody Valentine 3D.

This one’s simple. It’s a whodunit slasher movie with a shrinking cast of suspects. Classic! Let’s all try to guess who the killer is before our friends can!

Wait a minute, let’s not.

There’s really no point, not when the culprit, Tom, is effectively absolved not too long into the movie by being locked in a cage while more killing happens outside his reach.

It’s a killer-with-multiple-personalities twist, so some moments can be explained away as an unreliable narrator. Tom interacting with the masked killer, for example, is written off as a hallucination, but this doesn’t work on the cage scene.

The cage is not a hallucination. The pickaxe that the the killer uses to bend the door, trapping Tom inside, is not a hallucination. The big reveal montage showing how everything was done has Tom using the pickaxe to bend the cage shut from the inside, but… Annie, would you like to field this one?

THE PICKAXE WAS ON THE COCK-A-DOODIE OUTSIDE OF THE CAGE!!!!

You’re the best, Annie. Please don’t hurt me.

We enter into fiction expecting to be misled and misdirected a little, sometimes more artfully than others. When we go to a movie called My Bloody Valentine 3D, we should probably expect tricks as tacky as a parachute under Rocketman’s seat. But we always deserve better than the Cock-a-Doodie lie.

It means the difference between a cheap, cheesy good time and the joyless futility of playing a guessing game with Chris Griffin.

Chris: Guess what word I’m thinking of. And it’s not kitty.Meg: Is it kitty?Chris: GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

Hey, audience! Guess who the killer is. And it's not Tom.

It's Tom! Betcha didn't see that one coming, did you?

I don’t want to play anymore, do you?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

A couple years back, I posted a rant (among my favorite articles on this blog to date) about one of my biggest fiction pet peeves: Rape Gang Alley.

This month, I’ll be counting down five other recurring fictional motifs that get under my skin. Some are plain and simple errors, some are common cheap devices that rub me especially the wrong way with their excessive prevalence.

I love-love-love The Hunger Games, so I mostly forgive its wordbuilding flaws for the sake of the great characters and moments said world supports, but the rules of the eponymous game definitely count as an example of That Thing.

They're perfectly designed to set up Katniss's rebellion, which means they're pretty severely unrefined for their intended purpose of subjugation within the universe.

Really, in seventy-four years of forcing teenagers to fight to the death for the amusement of the rich, not one of them has ever considered suicide before Katniss? There’s no “play by the rules or we’ll kill your family” contingency already in place for this?

And if there isn’t such a precedent in play to keep tributes in line, why have none of them ever tried taking their righteous anger out on their captors at the first opportunity before? No one ever thought it might be worth putting up a force field to allay any temptation before Katniss’s stunt?

Sure, Katniss is a rebellious type, but these aren’t huge leaps given her position. No one else went there first? In seventy-four years? Why not? Why are all these loopholes still available?

Because drama wants Katniss to get to do these things and catch the bad guys unprepared.

Or, for a less cerebral, more visceral kind of logic-challenged drama, how about those subterranean monsters from The Descent?

The Descent is a frequent low-level entry on lists of the scariest movies of all time (when said lists acknowledge the existence of movies made within the last twenty years). It follows a group of spelunkers who lose their way in a cave system full of flesh-eating troglodytes, and yes, scary it is.

The problem is that the main weakness of the creatures, the main hope for the heroes, basically the central deciding element of the conflict, is the fact that after evolving for as long as they have in the absence of light, the creatures can’t see.

This allows for a lot of very tense scenes in which the heroes must make as little noise as possible to allow the creatures to pass them by, including a scene in which one of the creatures crawls unknowingly over a living person’s body.

Okay, it’s dramatic, but drama is all the thought that went into that monster design. Animals that evolve to live underground do end up with limited or nonexistent vision, because vision isn’t a priority for survival or mating when there’s no sunlight to see by. Other senses, on the other hand, are a priority when vision isn’t a viable option, and animals that survive and thrive without light adapt to compensate.

Why on earth would a species that’s existed underground long enough to lose its eyesight not have developed a decent sense of smell? How about heat sensing? Even while swimming through rivers of blood, those lost humans have to stand out pretty warm against an underground stone backdrop.

The only possible reason for these creatures to exist this way is to be able to crawl dramatically over potential victims without eating them.

It’s in the same boat those blood testers from Feed that drive me absolutely nuts. Who in their right mind would program a device to give results to the question “am I about to become a zombie?” in the form of dramatically cycling lights, unless their sole priority was to create audience tension?

This gripe isn’t a dismissal of the importance of drama, not by any means. The point of fiction is to make the audience feel something, and writers get a certain level of license to push things in dramatically necessary directions. There’s a responsibility, even, to give the fiction a chance to push further or present its subject more clearly than the cluttered randomness of reality can do alone.

But please, present me with that story in a place that feels possible from every angle, not only head-on. Give me enough internal logic to keep me from thinking my way out, and I’m that much closer to a captive audience.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

In a post zombie-rising world, civilization remains intact, thanks to rigorous security and blood testing procedures. The decline of traditional media, sped along by the public’s distrust after the underreporting of the rise of the zombies, has left the field open to independent news bloggers like brother and sister team Georgia and Shaun Mason. Georgia and Shaun are selected for a coveted position covering the campaign of a promising presidential candidate, but the backbiting, cutthroat nature of politics turns out a bit more literal than they’re expecting.

The Downside:

As Georgia notes early on, regarding her post-semi-apocalyptic journalism activities, “The zombies aren’t the story anymore.” The book as a whole could have benefited greatly from heeding her wisdom. A lot of time is spent recapping the generic, impersonal horrors of the initial rising of the dead, with a solemnity that tries and fails to conceal the popcorn action movie devices of suspense, particularly the scenes upon scenes of blood tests that give out results in the form of a red or green light, after cycling between the two like an arcade game.

The references to the existence of zombie fiction within the universe often come at the severe expense of the story at hand, especially in the naming of the characters. We’re told that the rise of zombies in an already zombie-savvy world has affected naming trends, and the casual presence of a Shaun, a Rick, and an Andrea among the cast fits that explanation, but we’re also told that Barbara and variants of George are now some of the most common names in the U.S thanks to -- you guessed it -- George Romero. So, in a world tragically ravaged by zombies, people are naming their children after the person who prophetically imagined them in advance? Why? He's not regarded as a hero of the zombie conflict or anything. And Barbara of all names? The useless catatonic from Night of the Living Dead? Wouldn’t the majority of parents naming their children with the zombie rising in mind choose names that offer some kind of hope against the zombies? No Selenas? No Maggies? Not even a Francine?

And that’s not even to mention Georgia and Shaun’s self-styled poet teammate who calls herself Buffy, because “I’m cute, blonde, and living in a world full of zombies.” If she’d only said “a world full of the undead,” it might quell the suspicion that the reference is made without any knowledge of the source, but it wouldn’t overcome the handicap of saddling a character with a name deeply pre-embedded with an existing persona. The Buffy of Feed is a perfectly adequate character, but not near special enough to break away from that, a problem the other characters are mostly spared, only by the commonness of their referential names.

Names aside, characters clearly intended to be liked make liking them unnecessarily difficult. Georgia’s a hard boiled reporter, fine, but it’s hard to trust her confidence in her own supposedly great competence when she’s constantly calling her teammates idiots, in all seriousness, while either taking the exact same risks she berates them for, or routinely profiting off their willingness to take them for her. The team’s pet presidential candidate, right after being established as the smart, humble, honest, compassionate, non-posturing contrast to the typical politician, suddenly pulls that hackneyed and infuriating anti-intellectual move of snapping at a perfectly articulate technical specialist who’s trying to help him, to demand that he “say it in English!”

There’s also a strange level of anti-fiction sentiment for a novel, and a genre novel at that. It makes sense within Georgia’s internal monologue -- she is a nonfiction writer after all -- but the book as a whole backs her up on this, just as it does on her hypocrisy about her methods. Examples are given of Buffy’s laughably melodramatic work, and Georgia’s assertions are never disputed, about how much easier it is for a freelancing fiction writer to earn attention and a living without expending any real effort, compared with how it is for her as a journalist. There’s no hint of how the presence of zombies may have somehow changed the world to make this true.

The Upside:

When the story at hand does take the foreground, with zombies for flavor, it’s a pretty decent, immersive, moody political thriller. As a zombie story, the career focus as opposed to survival focus of the characters gives it a different angle from the norm, and once the zombies intrude on the lives of our main characters in real time, it’s merciless. There’s one death scene in particular, or rather, the post-death scene, that’s incredibly powerful in terms of both pure sentiment and graphic shock in perfect proportions. It’s the kind of moment that makes a whole ride worthwhile.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!